Asterphaira
by syrrah
Summary: Edward Cullen is the school's top maths student. He is also top in music. He doesn't know what he will do when he leaves school until he meets an exchange teacher from England.


_Some of these characters are the property of SM. One of them isn't._

_This is a present for Dihenydd._

**Asterphaira**

Nothing happened, absolutely nothing. I'd like to make that clear from the outset. Nothing outside the fevered imaginings of my pathetic, over-active brain anyway.

Monday morning, math class. I'm a maths nerd, a complete dope, in love with numbers. Is there anything more beautiful and perfect than the Mandelbrot set? If there is I plan to discover it. I will decode it and present it, winged in its glory, I'll write it and speak it and give it to the world.

Spiral, helix, sphere, pyramid, curve, angle, eventual connections affirm life. Parallel lines break my heart. I don't know how they can exist, because life cannot exist without connection. The universe continues to expand until it begins to shrink, and what happens to the fleeing points of the parallel lines if the universe has an edge? That is what I am seeking to prove - that parallelism is not ultimately possible.

I'm barely listening to the teacher, because I barely do. Why would I? He is earth-bound. I draw busy, yet simple grids in the margin of my pages. You can only cross lines a certain number of times, just as you can only fold a piece of paper in half a certain number of times.

Apparently there is some sort of exchange program going on between us and England. Mr Garrett drones on and I pick out random words. Something about visitors to the school - I don't care, it's not important.

Then the door opens and there is some shuffling about as a group of people enter the classroom. Half a dozen of them spill around, moving into the aisle between desks, clearing throats and looking uncomfortable. I have noticed a lot of maths people are uncomfortable because numbers are stable and dependable and form law-abiding patterns while people are chaotic and messy and prevent you from concentrating.

These English exchange people are teachers, and they are here looking at the American system and seeing how it compares with theirs. Do our students enter college any better prepared than theirs do? Are our budding astrophysicists smarter than theirs?

I vaguely notice them, and afterwards I'm regretful that my initial impression was so inconclusive, so arbitrary. I regret that I didn't _look_, because I regret every second that was a missed opportunity, although really, there was no opportunity. There was nothing.

I have music first period after lunch, and I spend my lunch hour in the music room anyway. Music is numbers. I may love numbers, and I may be searching for the forbidden, hidden, perfect number, the formula, the sequence that rules everything and proves everything, but I have another desire. That desire is to set it to music. The world turns to a tune we can't hear, and when I find the numbers for it I will have the notes. Or I'll do it the other way round. Notes first, numbers following. The symphony of infinity.

I go to the piano room and I am working on several pieces which are really all the same piece. In the same way that knights tours have been notated, I like to convert other mathematical information into music. My interest lately is mapping constellations, gridding them and plotting co-ordinates in base twelve notation, and I play star maps. The piano locks me to base twelve, but I also play cello, and on the cello I am free to wander the intervals between our notes of even temperament, and free to consider the numbers in between numbers.

The cello has been described as the instrument closest to the human voice. That alone is enough to make me love it. However the cello, to me, is also the instrument that most closely approximates the sensuous, warm and irresistible curve of a woman's body. Music and maths, numbers and notes are the things that occupy my thoughts and endeavors, and I have never had my hands on a woman. I've yet to find one whose mind I admire enough, although I yearn to. I know there's something missing. When I find her, she will sigh and sing and cry like a cello, and she will speak to me in numbers.

I'm lost, fingers blurring in one of my futile attempts at improvisation. Futile, because there are so few notes on the piano and despite every effort I make not to get into habits, I still tend to repeat myself. I find a phrase and I may not replay it exactly, but I might modulate, and play it three semi-tones higher, or play it in a relative minor key. And much as I try to vary intensity, I find I repeat stresses, and play with a precision that soothes me. I don't want to be soothed. I frustrate myself constantly, finding small moments of exultation, and constantly striving.

A noise at the door stops me, despite hyper-focus.

I turn.

Who is that?

I've never seen her before.

She is not a student at the school.

Her clothes are odd. A plaid skirt, and complicated socks, which I would analyze if I were closer. A sweater with textured patterns which I would analyze as well, since I can't help myself. Everything she is wearing corresponds to numbers.

Her hair has a geometry to it. It's opaque black, not shiny, not tending towards brown or red, not artificially blue-black. Her hair is dull, but I don't think of dull as a negative. Dull is strong and doesn't reflect whatever is in front of it, and neither does it reveal what is behind it. Dull owns itself.

I absently register that she is beautiful, according to my personal standard of beauty, which may not correspond to anyone else's.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you. I thought there was a cd playing in here, and I came in to listen," she said. She is English. English Asian. In a flash, I don't want her to go, because she is one of the maths people, and because she was drawn here by numbers. Drawn to this room, I mean, because I play numbers.

"It's all right. You don't have to go," I told her.

On the little shelf built into the inside of the piano lid where you can put your sheet music, I had placed an exercise book. I'd drawn astersphairas on it. She looks beyond me and sees them, and comes forward.

"You're in Mr Garrett's class, aren't you?" she asked me. She is a combination of diffident and unshy.

"Yes," I answered.

"He told us about you. He said you're his most promising student. He said he can't teach you anything," she said.

I shook my head. "I have a lot to learn," I replied.

"I enjoyed what you were playing," she said. "I've always envied people who play instruments."

"Anyone can play, it's simply a matter of application," I said to her. "You put in the time, you get the results."

She smiled at me. "Reduction," she said. "You're perfectly right."

I shrug.

She is looking at my book. "You're a chess fan?"

"Not so much. I enjoy sequences," I said. "The royalism and sexism of chess always bothers me. Why is the king so important that he has to be guarded at all costs? Why is everyone else on the board so expendable? They fight his war - he sends his queen and his pawns to die for him."

"That's one way of looking at it," she answered. "What if you picture him as an infant? He can barely walk, after all. What if he's a boy king, a child king - and the queen isn't his wife, she's his mother? What mother wouldn't fight for her child?"

I stare at her in amazement. "But all subjects across the board? Is he really so adored that they lay down their lives, from the bishops to the knights to the foot soldiers?"

"What if he's the last child? Each army has fifteen players and a King. The Queen is without dispute the strongest warrior. You think that's sexist? It's said that it takes a whole village to raise a child. Look at the opposing sides as a village. The pawns are peasants, the bishops are clerics, the rooks are, I don't know, blacksmiths or carpenters. The knights are the only villagers wealthy enough to own horses. The mother flies screaming around them all, trying to rally them, desperate to save her son from the marauding hordes. He cowers and flees, but can only take stumbling baby steps, and she assigns villagers variously to protect him and to attack the invaders while she runs the whole campaign. Chess is a celebration of feminism. With tessellation."

I have never heard anything like it. I just blink at her, and she mistakes my speechlessness for - what?

She shakes her head. "I just raved then, didn't I?"

Yes, she did. I have never heard a woman rave like that before. I've heard them talk gossip and inconsequential nothings, and I've heard them discuss literature and politics and history with sureness an persuasive analysis, but I've never heard such an original and lateral perspective. She just turned something very basic and accepted in Western civilization as I understand it, on its head.

"Sorry, I interrupted your piano practice. I'll keep on exploring the school, and let you get back to it," she said.

"Actually, it's okay. I could play you something you might like, as a maths teacher. Do you know Debussy's Image Reflected in Water?" I asked her. It is a piece in which he used both the golden ratio, and the Fibonacci sequence.

She inclines her head towards me and smiles.

The piano bench in this room is about a yard wide, and I shuffle to one side and gesture to her with a nod, inviting her to sit next to me, as she looks awkward standing there. She sits, and I close my eyes.

I know the piece without needing the music, because I am such a pitiful savant that certain flows of numbers are ingrained in me, and I put my hands up to the keyboard, knowing where to place each finger, and how far to stretch for every note. I don't make mistakes, because I don't make mistakes. I feel it, because it is numbers.

At the end of the piece, I dare to look at her, and her eyes stare into infinity. The decay on the final note lasts a while and she waits until the waves have departed human hearing and are well on their way to the rest of the universe, and the rest of time itself.

"Thank you," she said, turning, eyes not quite meeting mine.

"My pleasure," I answered casually.

"I should probably get to the staff room now," she said, and she's still looking at the book I have there on the shelf. She reaches a hand and traces lines of my polyhedron with slender fingertips.

"Thank you," she says again, simply.

She goes to stand up, and that's when it happens.

I go to stand up too, and her hand is still extended, and I clumsily knock the piano bench back, and we both become slightly imbalanced. One of my hands reaches to hers, the other reaches unthinkingly to her waist to steady her, and I touch her fingers, and touch that curve between ribs and hips.

It's nothing, it's absolutely nothing. A flicker, her eyes glance to mine in surprise, and mine to hers, as our fingertips are in contact, and my hand comes into contact with her sweater, nothing more. She straightens, and I take my hands back, and nothing has happened. If there was CCTV recording us, it wouldn't show a thing.

But her fingertips are warm and vibrant and alive. They are golden and brown and contrast sharply with my paleness. Her waist dips in and flares out in a curve that teases mathematics - there would be a way to calculate it, but I don't want to know. She is shaped like a cello.

And her eyes? She is a teacher, and she's not a young teacher. I wouldn't like to estimate her actual age, but in her black eyes I see that the chronological age of a mind doesn't matter. In that briefest flash of a shared glance, I see my match.

I don't know if she saw it. too. She can't have. If she did, she wouldn't have left.

But she turned and she went, she walked through the door, and to the staffroom, or wherever.

She was only at my school for a day.

Can anything happen in a split second between two people - a look, a recognition, a knowing? It seemed to me that it could, but there was nothing afterwards, except to my mind a sense that I had lost something I hadn't even had.

I think she was probably quite a lot older than me, not that I care about that. Maybe she thought she couldn't possibly say anything, because it would be so inappropriate. Maybe she actually thought I was quite interesting, but immature. A boy. Maybe I imagined the look, and the touch, and the feeling, and the knowing. Maybe, but I don't know.

We didn't even know each other's names, but I don't believe we were parallel. I believe each of us was on a curved trajectory, and curves which seem to turn away from each other will eventually meet.

I have lacked intention before today, lost in my precision and calculations, and meanderings from A to G sharp. Now I feel I know my direction.

I can inquire from the school office what her name is. People aren't hard to find. Once I finish school, I intend to study maths at university in England, somewhere near where she is.

Fate, kismet, destiny?

If I'm right, it could be that she will find me first.

.

.

.

Chaper two? Don't tempt me. Really.


End file.
